Binary Brain

As I was folding my laundry today, it occurred to me that one of my greatest struggles with regards to materialism was the wonderment of how a materialist can possibly be happy.  How can someone who does not believe in nor see a God be happy about anything?  So much of my ideology of the good revolves around the idea that there is a God (or there are gods) who define the nature of The Good – as Plato so aptly discussed in The Republic and other discourses.

Then I came across a great interview of Daniel Dennett by Bill Moyers on the Charlie Rose show.  A number of times, Dennett gushed over the amazing wonderment that he beheld when listening to great music or confronted with beautiful nature.  I was truly surprised he didn’t wash away such amazing things with a statement of “…oh well, evolution can be magical, indeed… if you believe in that sort of thing” or some other pithy reply.  And today, thus, it hit me: is that all the debate is about?  Is this really a matter of awesomeness and whether or not awesomeness can happen without guidance from some transcendent or supreme being?

I think that is where my hangup has been all these years and maybe that is the problem for most of us when we are confronted with the possibility that without God we are left with a lack of explanation for all the awesomeness that surrounds us.  Somehow if we relegate consciousness to nerve endings and quantum impulses, we lose the beauty that is the soul?  Perhaps, we need to forget all of that mumbo-jumbo and realize that beauty is what our minds hold in awe… without guidance from above.

Awesomeness has never been a good reason to fall back on faith.  The terrible awesomeness of cancer doesn’t mean that I search out a cure from my neighbor voodoo doctor, does it?  Imagine someone from the 1800s traveling to today confronted with the technological wonders that populate our lives.  Wouldn’t they think we were transcendent, with so much access to power and control?  I don’t wish to take away the magic that is the consciousness, but I do want to question why it can’t be mere material processes that have combined qualities that other materials don’t exhibit.  As Dennett continues to emphasize, magic is not magic.  It is a method of distraction.  We need to realize that distraction does not equate to miracle and without miracles, we need to find scientific explanations for which awesomeness is not a fact, but an adjective describing a fact.